Confessions of a Mennonite Camp Follower
The king has ribbed me a bit about the growing list of denominations with which I have declared common cause. When we met I was a loyal United Methodist. Over the course of our first year here I have discovered that 'Methodist' is just another word for someone with a "doubtful theological background," and I have been enchanted with rightness of those I had assumed, in my denominationalism, were wrong. I have discovered that I came to Duke wrong on most things of which I was certainly certain. Since many of those dearly departed certainties were things I learned in Sunday School designed to help me understand why Baptists and Catholics were heathen, I have grown deeply skeptical of the whole notion of denominations. And so, at my last audience with the king, the one in which I basked in his royal admonishment of my faithlessness, I confessed to being an evangelical postliberal post-denominational Wesleyan Anglo-Catholic (b)aptist. Which, I insist, amounts to a fair impressionistic depiction of John Wesley, Jim McClendon, and even Stan the Man.
It turns out that I am not alone in my ecclesial whoredom. Reading during my quiet time this morning from an essay by St. Stanley his very self ("Confessions of a Mennonite Camp Follower" in Disrupting TIme, 2004), I find the following:
"...like a camp follower, I do not have an ecclesial home, so I whore after that which I think is faithful to the gospel. I cannot pretend that such a position can be made ecclesially intelligible. My only defense is that God in our time seems to have led many of us to that point. We live in a time when the theological battles that seemed so important and justified Christian divisions simply no longer matter....That God has made some ecclesially homeless we can only pray will be the beginning of a unity, as John [Yoder] would put it, from the bottom up."
So, beloved king and followers of all things Socratic, I confess that I, too, am a Mennonite camp follower. It may be because I like Martin so much, or it may be because those submariner's dolphins for which I worked so hard have corroded in the light of the politics of Jesus. And be warned, mighty king, that I intend to follow shamelessly other camps that I encounter on this journey. You see, this faithlessness that others may decry as a fancy for fetishes, I see as a bashing of boundaries that no longer matter. It's liberating. But that's not all. Ecclesial whore though I am, I am also an aging warrior with no time to waste following camps fighting yesterday's battles; for it seems clear to me now that tomorrow's war demands that we be free of today's boundaries. And I have no doubt we are being fashioned to fight tomorrow's fight for the kingdom, albeit with plowshares and pruning hooks. We will be ordained at a time in history when the church in America fractures over inescapable, polarizing questions of sex, gender, race, and worship style that are already shaping new ecclesial boundaries. So, like St. Stanley, I intend to whore after that which I think is faithful to the gospel. I know that means I won't be ecclesially intelligible. My only defense is that God seems to have led others ahead of me to pass through that same point.
It turns out that I am not alone in my ecclesial whoredom. Reading during my quiet time this morning from an essay by St. Stanley his very self ("Confessions of a Mennonite Camp Follower" in Disrupting TIme, 2004), I find the following:
"...like a camp follower, I do not have an ecclesial home, so I whore after that which I think is faithful to the gospel. I cannot pretend that such a position can be made ecclesially intelligible. My only defense is that God in our time seems to have led many of us to that point. We live in a time when the theological battles that seemed so important and justified Christian divisions simply no longer matter....That God has made some ecclesially homeless we can only pray will be the beginning of a unity, as John [Yoder] would put it, from the bottom up."
So, beloved king and followers of all things Socratic, I confess that I, too, am a Mennonite camp follower. It may be because I like Martin so much, or it may be because those submariner's dolphins for which I worked so hard have corroded in the light of the politics of Jesus. And be warned, mighty king, that I intend to follow shamelessly other camps that I encounter on this journey. You see, this faithlessness that others may decry as a fancy for fetishes, I see as a bashing of boundaries that no longer matter. It's liberating. But that's not all. Ecclesial whore though I am, I am also an aging warrior with no time to waste following camps fighting yesterday's battles; for it seems clear to me now that tomorrow's war demands that we be free of today's boundaries. And I have no doubt we are being fashioned to fight tomorrow's fight for the kingdom, albeit with plowshares and pruning hooks. We will be ordained at a time in history when the church in America fractures over inescapable, polarizing questions of sex, gender, race, and worship style that are already shaping new ecclesial boundaries. So, like St. Stanley, I intend to whore after that which I think is faithful to the gospel. I know that means I won't be ecclesially intelligible. My only defense is that God seems to have led others ahead of me to pass through that same point.
posted by Unknown at 4:58 AM
8 Comments:
I wonder if ecclesial whoredom annunciates the collapse of a cultural-linguistic model of religion because, as phil points out, it is language of the most protestant of natures. And so instead of understanding religion as the aquisition of the cultural language you are a part, you (re)form that language according to how you see it.
Would Vanhoozer's adaptation of Lindbeck lead, actually, to a more catholic understanding of formation?
I just noticed that craig posted this at 4:58 AM. Hopefully he slept a little bit last night. Craig, you are truly an inspiration.
Now, to get to the point, I find the "fathers" an equally undefinable category as "private judgement" and so I rarely have "them" in mind, but that is just semantics.
I think tertullian is the great example of someone held in authority by the church up until the point he goes beyond scripture (montanism or monarchialism, I get them confused).
The church of the fathers was divided, the church of the new testament was divided ("some claim the baptism of Cephas or Apollo"), to seek a restoration is still looking towards divided times, a nostalgia of the most violent nature. Do protestants who seek restoration of the ancient church work against the eschatological direction of history and attempt to supplaint the work of the Spirit in the name of foggy-eyed nostalgia?
Concerning phil's interpretation of Craig, I don't think that Craig seeks the creation of a new church as much as he desires to live faithfully to the invisible Church of Jesus Christ (for the visible church is just an adminstrative unit, right Craig?), but I'm puuting words into his mouth and he's a big boy.
Phil, I find it fascinating that you and others accept "private judgment" as the definition of a liberal Protestant. That's a great debate technique, but it strikes me as an unanswerable indictment that is a great rhetorical technique but that makes little sense. I can't imagine who won't fit into that definition. If humans are indeed "finite freedom" then all humans must exercise private judgment or abdicate the responsibility of freedom (and thus be "less than human").
As I understand the label, a liberal Protestant is not simply one who exercises private judgement. Rather, the idea goes back to Kant and flows from him to the Ritschl school - the neo-Kantians. To quote St. Stan, "Protestant theologians, no longer sure of the metaphysical status of Christian claims, sought to secure the ongoing meaningfulness of Christian convictions by anchoring them in anthropological generalizations and/or turning them into ethics." The ethics described is one based on the categorical imperative, based on Kant's observation that "in the appearance of the God-Man (on earth), it is not that in him which strikes the sense and can be known through experience, but rather the archetype, lying in our our reason, that we attribute to him..., which is really the object of saving faith, and such a faith does not differ from the principle of a course of life well-pleasing to God." Liberal Protestant theology, says Stanley, is but a footnote to Kant, in which Kant's ethics are "dressed in religious language."
So liberal Protestantism, it seems, is indicated not merely by the exercise of "private judgment," but rather by the reduction of the Gospel to a message that is no more than the categorical imperative.
I don't see all discernment as "liberal Protestantism," given Stanley's definition of the phrase. Moreover, not all Protestantism is liberal. It seems to me that there is a type of Protestantism, surely seen in Luther and Calvin, that is Protest-ant because it is prophetic criticism - it protests. Protestant criciticism is "directed by the emerging form to the form that is passing away." One does not have to have an abstract notion of the kerygma (as in liberal protestantism) to protest our current forms of being the church. Indeed, it seems to me that the constant duty of self-criticism that results from recognition of the fallibility of our private and collective judgment is fundamental to being a Protestant.
I don't doubt I am a Protestant (given the above), but I am striving mightily to be freed from the habit of reducing the Gospel to a container ("a message") for the categorical imperative, which, as I understand it, is what marks a "liberal Protestant." If you see me falling into that habit, please hold me accountable.
My "no" to the effort to banish private judgment is because I recognize that move for what it is: a dictum issued by those in power to assure that those who have no power have no legitimate authority to protest. All protest is thus illegitimatized. It's the way Saducees maintain power, the way slaveowners maintain slaves, and the way men assure their dominance over women. No, Phil, no. We are called to discern and debate and then to make private judgments - the only kind of judgments human are really capable of - and then act on those judgments, accepting the risks of freedom (the possibility of our being wrong). I am arguing here not for the norm, but the exception. There must always be the warranted possibility of private judgment. Else there are no Jeremiah's, no MLK's.
I don't think you really mean what you are saying explicitly, but rather something similar on which we both can probably agree. I think what you mean to say is that we, recognizing our bond in Christ, agree to mutual subjection and conciliarism in lieu of autonomy. We seek theonomy, and not autonomy or heteronomy. You describe heteronomy and lift it up as a Christian ideal. But I think you really mean to say that we are to seek theonomy, and that, because of our fallible judgment, we agree that our best way to discern God's will is within the faith community. You seem to want a magisterium and to locate it in some abstract catholic community. But, as an Anglican, note that is not the Anglican way. There is no magisterium in Anglicanism. Rather, there is the presumption that the community of faith, reading Scripture corporately via the Book of Common Prayer (which includes Nicene and Chalcedon), will discern God's will corporately - not as mavericks but not as a subjects of a papal kingdom either. We retain our possibility of independent thought and our connection to each other. The problem with ECUSA is that it has acted autonomously (on gay issues and others) and against the rest of the communion. They defend that move with a claim to prophecy. A major issue is the method by which the faith community discerns God's will in this exceptional moment. Is there room, nay, the demand, for prophetic voices? Yes, always. However, there is at the same time a conservative premise of mutual subjection to a communion process that slows but does not prevent protestant action.
Sole scriptura is obviously the only conception of authority - the method of decision-making - that you respect right now. However, I suggest that your depiction of it is self-referential itself AND not scriptural. What a paradox, eh? Stanley has written on this , I know, but so too has Dr. Hays and many others whose work is respectworthy. Paul actively interpreted Scripture, and so did Jesus. Scripture was not reduced by them to a static law, but rather they wrestled with it, applying it to concrete temporal realities, but using midrash techniques like metalipsis and pesher to extract its meaning. While the canon is not open for us, surely we must wrestle with it similarly, and in the wrestling is the reason, the necessity of private judgment, within the context of the faith community.
And that wrestling, I believe, is what leads rational, faithful, theonomy-seeking women and men to conclude that women's ordination is God's will. Within the Anglican communion, I note, that issue is one to which the rest of the communion has reacted by accepting tentatively the prophetic action of ECUSA, whereas their reaction to the ordination of gays has been to reject that autonomous action. So I infer that within the Anglican Communion, at least, those subject to the sanctified Word have concluded that ordination of women is the will of God. It seems your private judgment leads you to disagree, but alas, you have no right of protest according to your own rules, eh?
I agree with all of your seven points, especially on the nature of prophets. I must add that you are far more confident than I am of our ability to comprehend readily what the Sanctified Word says to us on all issues that confront us. Similarly, I seem more concerned than you about the possibility of a repetition of events such as those in my lifetime in which your "all creativity is heresy" approach has been used to justify apartheid and suppression of minorities and women in America. I know that is not how you intend it, but I can imagine how others could use similar words for less noble purposes. At the same time I acknowledge your concern that the prophet's label is rarely appropriate for those who claim their actions are prophetic.
Before this gets to any sort of resolution, I would still like to gripe about sola scriptura. That is, I feel that it is completely unhelpful and mostly harmful to use the language of sola scriptura because it leads directly to Dort and the tulip resonse to the remonstrants.
I often times end up at semantics, but these are not petty details. By claiming the mantle of sola scriptura you (i.e., whoever claims it) claim a lot more than biblicist fundamentalism, but you also claim a lot more than scripture alone. (I did notice that craig first used that language, but phil adopted it and defended it quickly)(I'm also arguing against Vanhoozer on this one phil).
Yes, Wilson, I was the first to use the phrase, but, as Phil correctly inferred, I used it in a pejorative fashion, for I share your skepticism. Note that I implied that it is a false notion to the extent that it suggests that it is not at least a two-legged stool (scripture and reason). Given exegetical praxis and the rule of faith, I suspect that it is really more of a self-referential three legged stool (incorporating the influences of tradition but not naming that fact). Phil, in our face-to-face, nuanced this quite well, making a distinction based on the relative priority given reason rather than pretending it was not at work. I walked away with the impression that Phil's concern is to shut down the typical appeals to reason by which we rationalize our decisions to ignore Scripture when it conflicts with our private judgment. I'm with him on that. Did I read you rightly, Phil?
I feel like the table analogy falsifies the christian understanding of authority to the point where we strive against imbalance to the point of focusing on balance instead of on the truth that speaks through the spirit.
Looking for doctrine by Scripture, Tradition, and Reason (like the good anglicans that you(pl) are) seems as historical an imposition as Outler's quadrilateral and utterly foreign to the early church with whom we attempt to inline ourselves as much as possible. Their hermeneutic seems to be very different, though I can't articulate what that is (I'm really just trying to keep this going)
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